Effective Teaching of Science and Math Vocabulary 

(Originally titled “A Few Words About Math and Science”)

In this Educational Leadership article, Peter Fisher and Camille Blachowicz (National Louis University/Chicago) suggest ways for teachers to help students master the technical vocabulary in STEM subjects. “In math and science instruction, new words typically are more complex, refer to more unfamiliar and complex concepts, and are more densely packed in the text than in the language arts,” say Fisher and Blachowicz – for example, solar energy, and associative property of addition. The good news is that terms often come in conceptual clusters – isosceles, equilateral, scalene, obtuse, acute, right angle. Here are their principles for teaching this kind of vocabulary:

• Link manipulatives to language. Teachers need to orchestrate lessons in which students hear, read, speak, see, and write key terms (for example, diameter, radius, volume, calculate, and measure) as they manipulate physical objects. Word problems are a perennial challenge for many students since the “small” words (compare, design, look, work, average, equivalent, vary) tend to be confusing, the main idea usually comes at the end, and it’s difficult to distinguish important from unimportant details. Fisher and Blachowicz suggest this sequence: read, think, paraphrase, visualize, draw/diagram, solve, and explain/justify. 

• Include visual representations. For example, in a unit on sound, third graders in a two-way immersion class listen to a book (Zounds: The Kids’ Guide to Sound Making by Frederick Newman (Random House, 1983), construct a Spanish/English word wall of vocabulary about sound, organize the words around the concepts of volume, pitch, frequency, and intensity, and create Wordles to graphically display the words.

• Use meaningful and varied repetition and review. “If students didn’t understand a word the first time it was taught, repeating the same instruction or having them reread the word in exactly the same context most likely won’t be more successful,” say Fisher and Blachowicz. “Front-loading all your vocabulary at the beginning of a unit also doesn’t work.” The trick is to come back to key words in different contexts – for example, watching a video, reading, sorting graphic manipulatives, completing a Venn diagram, talking to their partners.

• Teach morphemes. These include roots, prefixes, suffixes, and other meaningful word parts. In math, these might have to do with number (tri, quad, bit) and size (ampli, magn); in science, they can include areas of study (astro, photo, bio, astro). There are two ways to help students develop morphological awareness, say Fisher and Blachowicz: breaking words apart to find their morphemes, and putting together complex words from morphemes. Collecting word families is also helpful – for example, photograph, photosynthesis, telephoto, photogenic. 

“A Few Words About Math and Science” by Peter Fisher and Camille Blachowicz in Educational Leadership, November 2013 (Vol. 71, #3, p. 46-51), www.ascd.org; the authors can be reached at pfisher@nl.edu and cblachowicz@nl.edu. 

From the Marshall Memo #510